Intermezzo: Revisiting Helmut Newton

After more than 20 years of successfully presenting the permanent exhibition _Helmut Newton’s Private Property_ on the ground floor of the Museum for Photography, the Helmut Newton Foundation is expanding the concept and radically overhauling the presentation. The core objective – to use this space to illuminate the lives of Helmut Newton and his wife, June – remains. As a transitional step in this transformation, the Helmut Newton Foundation presents a cinematic _Intermezzo_ featuring Helmut Newton in an immersive space. On the ground floor, eight video projectors cast a film across four screens. The production is partly based on a film portrait created three years ago for a major Newton exhibition at the MOP Foundation in A Coruña, Spain, produced by Profirst International in collaboration with Martin Salvador Studio. This footage is now supplemented by previously unreleased material from various sources, including personal recordings by June Newton recently reviewed and digitized in the foundation’s archives. For the first time, Berlin audiences can watch interviews with numerous voices from Newton’s world – including Philippe Garner, Carla Sozzani, Jenny Capitain, Violetta Sanchez, and Matthias Harder – offering an entirely new way to experience Newton’s oeuvre. Edited into a seamless loop, the film offers visitors a surprising and content-rich experience. In the rear section of the ground-floor gallery, nearly 100 of Newton’s exhibition posters remain on view, though the setting has been refreshed to include several posters from Alice Springs’ solo exhibitions. In the 16-meter (approx. 52-foot) display case beneath the posters, the vintage magazines featuring Newton’s published work have been swapped out for the _Intermezzo_ presentation. They now feature different fashion and lifestyle titles and include editorial work by Alice Springs, such as issues of _Jardin des Modes, Elle, Vogue, Vanity Fair, Egoïste, Stern, The New Yorker, Photo,_ and _Paris Match_. While the physical display remains the same, the content has shifted. Walking the length of the showcase continues to offer an intense look at the evolution of fashion photography and the changing image of women in the Western world – from the late 1950s to the turn of the 21st century – capturing the revolutionary social upheavals of the 1960s and ‘70s and their visual impact on fashion, which, as we know, always mirrors the zeitgeist. Spotlight: Behind the Frame In the corridors flanking _Intermezzo_, large wall panels feature illustrated biographies on the life and work of Helmut and June Newton, displayed alongside framed portraits of the foundation’s two founders. Opposite the massive poster wall, a new curatorial series titled _Spotlight: Behind the Frame_ makes its debut. This concept, which will be refreshed at irregular intervals, focuses on a single iconic photograph by Helmut Newton or Alice Springs. It illuminates the history of the image’s creation and distribution through contact sheets, original publications, notes, preparatory Polaroids, and related shots. The series launches with _Rue Aubriot_, Newton’s legendary 1975 fashion photograph for French _Vogue_ shot on the street of the same name, alongside the first photograph in Alice Springs’ oeuvre: a 1970 advertisement for Gitanes cigarettes featuring a smoking male model, also shot in Paris. This miniature exhibition format will eventually be handed over to guest curators to provide fresh, external perspectives on the work of Helmut Newton and Alice Springs. In doing so, the foundation is literally opening itself and its archives for new encounters.